Enterprise projects Are Becoming More Consumer-focused

Kristin Myers has a top IT leadership role at The Mount Sinai Health System, and her new initiatives aim to pay off with better service to patients.

With constant changes happening daily in the healthcare industry, technology departments in provider organizations are focused on providing business value and being trusted advisors. Kristin Myers, senior vice president of technology at The Mount Sinai Health System, has seen her role evolve as she has taken on more responsibility in the application space.

For the last 14 years, Myers has led the transformation of the Epic clinical and revenue cycle implementations at the New York-based health system. The organization has had success with its electronic health records initiatives it was awarded the HIMSS 2012 Enterprise Davies Award of Excellence in 2012, and all 4 of its hospitals are now on Epic. The Mount Sinai Hospital and Mount Sinai Queens, Mount Sinai St. Luke’s and Mount Sinai West facilities have achieve ved Stage 6 on HIMSS Analytics’ Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model, with hopes of achieving Stage 7, the highest level possible, this year.

With the ability to have transparency in workflows and make data-driven decisions with the use of predictive analytics, Myers addressed some of the new directions ahead for Mount Sinai in a recent interview with health journalists

When asked to talk about her the scope of her responsibility at Mount Sinai after so many tears, Meters said that her role currently oversees application strategy, as well as responsibility for all clinical applications, the Epic platform, interoperability and the IT Program Management Office. As an academic medical center, there is a lot of innovation, and we are able to work on exciting programs that are aligned with the overall health system strategy, which keeps the team and I motivated.

When Meyers was asked how the system at Mount Sinai expects to use predictive analytics, she explained that there was a collaborative relationship between the technology team and the data science teams to improve patient care by running predictive analytics in the clinical workflow. The use cases around predicting falls, delirium and sepsis are the first areas that have been focused on, which is very exciting work. We are also using analytics to develop daily management centers in the hospitals and a centralized command center.

She said they had other IT systems they used in improving care delivery at the health system of which one of these large programs is access to ensure that access to care is a consistent experience throughout the system. We need to have the ability to track every patient interaction with the health system, be it through the access center on the phone, email, text or chat. We are developing an enterprise customer relationship management strategy to ensure patients have a consistent experience and ensure we’re personalizing our communication with them in the way that they want, whether that be through text or phone calls or through our portal.

Meyers said that she works closely with their CMIO, clinical and business operations and our executive team to understand the priorities and strategy so that the technology portfolio is aligned. It is important to be a trusted partner and for the teams to be able to deliver consistently.

When asked how she advanced innovation in healthcare IT as well as learn of other innovations the health system can apply, Meyers said that it was critical to network within healthcare, to go to conferences, or seek training to educate yourself. Looking outside of healthcare at other industries to see their transformations is essential. For example, customer relationship management is something that’s prevalent in other industries.

She added that some of the IT projects they were currently working on at Mount Sinai includes finalizingthe customer relationship management strategy for the health system to support the consumer experience as part of the overall access strategy for patients is a high priority. From an enterprise application strategy, finishing the Epic clinical and revenue cycle implementation across the health system is a priority. We also have a three-year plan for ERP transformation across the health system that kicked off recently with a focus on HR, supply chain and financials.